Battlefield 3 Interview With Producer Patrick Liu: maps, betas and jets

The Guardian has published an interesting interview with the producer of Battlefield 3, Patrick Liu and in it a selection of reader's questions were put to Liu. The choice of maps and the meaning of what a "beta" and a "demo" seem to be causing confusion amongst players are just two. It appears that players were disappointed with the Paris map, because it doesn't have any vehicles, but there was a good technical reason for that. The alpha game had a quickly designed "rush" map just to test the basic code, performance etc. To make testing comparisons between the alpha and the beta as similar as possible, the map used in the beta had to be essentially the same but it looks like gamers were expecting a demo with lots of different maps. However, providing those isn't necessarily appropriate for a beta test. On top of that Liu is confident that the various technical glitches will be ironed out by the time of the launch on 28th October.